OCEAN £19.95 * Joystick

This is one of the ever-growing band of scrolling beat-em-ups with a Ninja origin. Your task is to fight through six of the toughest neighbourhoods in America.

Using attacking moves you attempt to defeat the ghoulish Assassins that rule the streets and try to become the greatest Shadow Warrior of them all. Swing kicks and flying neck throws are your only other attacking moves and the ability to live three lives completes your defensive approach.

Graphics are colourful and give a realistic effect of a typical suburban neighbourhood, but the sprites behave like a horde of drunken zombies - realistic too, perhaps? A simultaneous two-player option gives the game a light at the end of the tunnel, but otherwise the action is far too similar to many a fighting game that has gone before. Only recommended for hardened beat-em-up addicts.

OCEANPRICE: £19.99

There's nothing like a reasoned argument and a kick in the mush is nothing like a reasoned argument. A beat 'em up isn't "principled". If it's good it's because it has been programmed well enough for you to leave the enemy gobsmacked and corpses in your wake. It won't have intellectual pretension and so much the better for it.

Shadow Warriors by Ocean scores well on the body count. It's admirable, too, in terms of its technical accomplishment. Shadow Warriors scrolls nicely, has crisp, well-drawn and colourful graphics, and manoeuvring while fighting is simplicity itself.

Amiga Shadow Warriors is as much fun as the original Tecmo coin-op. The sprite resolution has been improved and the sound has been sampled giving the crispest of tones as fist meets flesh.

An unnamed American metropolis has been blitzed by rabid assassins. You, one of the Shadow Warriors, are a top-notch ninja who's out to stop the rot.

The aim is to battle your way through six levels - or neighbourhoods - and destroy the assassins before thwarting an evil demon. Your ninja can jump on to platforms with relative ease, and you get to perform a whole host of throws and kicks with obligatory, long and exotic names - Triple Blow Combination, The Phoenix Backflip and so on...

Although the programmers have done a good job of making it easy to execute these moves, the game at times is very tough going. The sprites are beautifully drawn but some of the blue-clothed nasties merge into the blue backgrounds, and when you're in the heat of a scrap they can be annoyingly difficult to pick out.

Shadow Warriors will never win the award for the best beat 'em up ever. It is attractive enough to look at but the gameplay, although faithfully recreated, does not have anything to lift it out of the ordinary. However, those who like beat 'em ups should have nothing to fear from purchasing this.

GRAPHICSSOUNDPLAYABILITYLASTABILITYOVERALL

85%78%79%77%78%

Reviewed by Steve James for CU Amiga, p.43, Issue Aug '90, August 1990

Ocean, C64 £9.99 cassette, £14.99 disk; Amiga £24.99

An oriental demon has arrived in New York and recruited a massive army of street thugs to dominate the city. Only you can stop them. And who are you? Well, long ago when Japan was divided by warring states, the Shadow Warriors Secret Ninja Society was formed.

Membership of the society is proved not by a special tie or weird handshake, but by knowing the Five Secret Ninjitsu Techniques: the Triple Blow Combination, Flying Neck Throw, Hang Kick, Phoenix Backflip and Tightrope Technique.

Each Shadow Warrior has four lives, each of which comprises five energy units. One or two players (only one on C64) can take on the street thugs in six American neighborhoods before the final Demonic confrontation.

The first level is set in a fairly typical street, with some tightropes to walk along. Level two has the ninja crossing busy roads with hit-and-run drivers zooming along. There's also mad bikers racing across the pavement on their Harleys. The next level takes place in neon-lit Las Vegas, then it's the Grand Canyon! All of the levels have the traditional superbaddie or two at the end, so it's as well there's five continue plays.

Besides the unusual combat moves, Shadow Warriors is distinguished by the players being able to leap onto edges and objects such as telephone boots, barrels and hot dog stands. If you throw a man into these objects they're destroyed, revealing icons for a sword, extra energy, lives and points. The sword is pretty nifty to use, but getting hit results in vanishing!

It's a chock-a-block games market when it comes to beat-'em-ups and Shadow Warriors needs to be pretty spectacular to compete with the likes of IK+, Exploding Fist etc, etc. Aside from some fairly good backdrops I'm struggling to find anything good to say about the C64 game. There's little in the way of enemy sprite variation, collision detection is overly precise and only the throw mode works moderately well.
The Amiga game works considerably better, with lots of coin-op style presentation and an excellent title tune and very good graphics. Despite the limited number of effective moves it's highly playable and the two-player mode works a threat, (although Phil kept thumping me by 'accident'!). Good fun, but level three is possibly too tough.

Although the Amiga version has the usual pale Teque palette, it's not too bad this time, with plenty of variety and detail on the levels. More importantly the combat moves are new and imaginative, the Flying Neck Throw being particularly impressive. In short, this is an excellent coin-op conversion which beat-'em-up fans will love. Others may feel there isn't enough new stuff to get that excited about, but there's no denying this is a very well executed and enjoyable game.
The C64 version is much less technically impressive, with the enemy sprites blocky and simplistic. The background graphics start off crude as well, but improve significantly with an atmospheric New York City on level two - albeit lacking cars. Gameplay is extremely tough with strict collision detection making landing a punch irritatingly hard. It seems impossible until you master the difficult throw technique (down and fire, despite what the instructions say). The game then becomes possible, but is acceptable rather than enjoyable.